Changing Places, Losing Time
Erica Shindler Briggs | 18.Feb.10
The concept of time has always been relative. Whether you’re having the time of your life or bored to death, time can fly by or beg to be killed. Time is so fluid, it can be changed at whim, by any moron in power. The former Bush administration managed to get me up an hour earlier weeks in advance of when daylight savings was suppose to be, a time established back when American farmer’s planted crops in season. There are those who argue against the notion that there is a past or future time; there is only now. Differing philosophies aside, change (painfully slow or quite suddenly,) can only happen in time. Change is measured against the wheel of time, by comparing what was with what is. Yet, the essence of what matters – the nature of man – remains constant through time. There are no new stories, only new players acting out the same conflicts that have plagued humanity since before stories were told.
Place, however, is precise. Our experience of a certain place may be relative, but not the place itself; “it is what it is” regardless of perspective. If I say I will be some place at a certain time, the one thing that is non-negotiable is my presence in that place. I may not be on time for whatever reason, but the bottom line is that I was not there, in place, as promised. I can make up time, but I cannot pretend to be somewhere I’m not, unless I live in a different time, like Memo Cruz in the 2009 film Sleep Dealer. Director Alex Rivera neatly juxtaposes an unknown time, void of place, with a familiar story: the conflict between archaic systems of automated exploitative control and the essence of what makes us human – the capacity to love.
Santa Ana del Rio, Mexico is a place without a time. The village could exist now, or 100 years ago. In this film, directed by Alex Rivera, is a dying dustbowl community in the future. Thirsty for life, it’s people pay for water that once flowed freely but is now dammed and owned by an American corporation willing to protect the valuable resource with deadly force. Memo lives near the dam with his parents and brother, though he would rather be any place but home. His father is in denial, holding on to past dreams of living off the land, tied to the place. Memo knows this dream is dead. He lives in a time when place no longer exists except for social hierarchy; the have’s live in one place, the have-nots in another. The only way Memo can escape his place in life is through technology and his own dreams of finding work in a hi-tech factory in the north. Ironically, however, it is his passion for gadgetry, and his home-made radio, that condemns him to technological slavery.
After eavesdropping on the water company’s security force communications, his signal is located by dam headquarters in America. His place is identified and targeted as housing suspected “Aqua-Terrorists.” In this age, anti-terrorism is engaged in a new and improved way. The military strikes via remote control drones. Miles away from the target, an American soldier connects to a network of machines, inserting wires into his implanted Matrix-like "nodes." Then, from the comfort and safety of his station, the soldier bombs the target, a gladiator event that is commercialized for viewing in a live American reality television broadcast, narrated by a COPS voice narrator. Memo happens to catch this episode, watching in horror as “hi-tech heroes blow the hell out of the bad guys,” his father, his home, destroyed. The crowd goes wild.
Rivera has created a world that is less science fiction and more prophetic vision; it is a reality that already exists, our technology just hasn’t caught up yet. Further, Rivera rightly assumes future American television audiences will become more grossly perverted in their narcotized dysfunction of living as apathetic bystanders. In Rivera’s future, the human condition has not changed with time, we simply have more advanced gadgets to separate and alienate, disconnect and disenfranchise. The American corporations are still in control, defended by military might. Property lines between the US and Mexico, between life and water, are fiercely protected. Exploitative policies are played out across the border, using fresh, innovative technology.
Illegal immigration is no longer a problem for future America. Migrant workers can work for us without ever leaving the discomfort of their home; the company completes the work without the physical presence of the worker. The person is removed from our place, keeping to his place, thus no longer in our face constantly reminding us that our prosperity requires that others live in poverty. It’s the American dream, one in which sleep deprived employees work 12 hour shifts like robots, literally. In cities across America, physical labor is completed by little robots operated by real people south of the border. These sleepwalking spirits are sapped of their soul in exchange for money they can send home, (minus a hefty service fee.) Hardly the hi-tech dream job Memo was hoping for, but this is not the way the job is advertised. Guys like Memo hang their hopes on the lure of more money to better provide for family. With a healthy dose of guilt for his part in killing his father, Memo is driven to journey north to Tijuana, destined to take his place among the masses of indentured servants. As expected, the city is harsh, feels desperate. It isn’t long before Memo is plugged into the system, thanks to the help of Luz, an aspiring journalist who has dreams of her own.
Luz lives the tech life, first as a node installer, and secondly, and more passionately, as a writer. In this time, writing no longer requires paper or pen or even a keypad. After inserting the appropriate wires into her implanted nodes, Luz downloads her memories into a database; here she expresses thoughts and reflections which are then submitted to be searched and sold worldwide. Her memories of her first chance encounter with Memo stirs interest in a buyer, who solicits more entries and pays for them in advance. Money motivates as strongly in this place and time as it does in our own. Luz easily tracks down the newly arrived villager, having advised him earlier as to where to get node implants. She finds him huddled in a crowded alley, disheveled from his search for a reputable implanter, which turned out to be as tenuous as finding a reliable crack addict.
It doesn’t take long for Luz and Memo to connect more than nodes, though it’s not an open, honest connection. Luz is pulling out details of Memo’s life for the purpose of fulfilling her buyer’s request. Memo is supplying his memories because of his growing attachment to her. Though Memo is being provided for emotionally, Luz is using him nonetheless; directing intimate conversations to reveal a targeted memory is a form of exploitation. Mild, perhaps, and voluntary, but the memories are obtained under duress. This is a central theme in the film; the misuse of resources. Water, once freely available, is dammed, controlled and sold as an overpriced commodity. Emotions and memories, sensitive and authentic, are manipulated, taken advantage of, and vended for entertainment. Labor is extorted, human resource exploited for the sole purpose of profit. The cost is losing our sense of place and time, the context that feeds what makes us human; our mind, heart, dreams, character – our soul. In Sleepdealer, the soul is stolen and sold. What is most disconcerting is how easily the body, that place that stores the soul, is changed to better fit the emptiness, to more conveniently steal the soul away. The nodes, surgically punched into human limbs, become the holes through which we lose ourselves. Though this film is fiction, I say our scientific, cultural, and social direction is more close to this place and time than we should be daring to move. There is solution, but it is spiritual and therefore inherently set-up against concrete reality that so many people have come to rely.
If any hope exists, it is found, ironically, in the American soldier, the one who controlled the droid that dropped the bomb on Memo’s home. There is a brief scene where he is at the table with his mother and father. The soldier asks his father if he ever had doubts about what he did when he was soldier. His father is adamant in his curt response, “No.” His mother is quick to console the young soldier’s conscious. “We’re so proud of you.” What’s a soldier to do? Herein lies the question, its answer determining how humanity will fare in the war to keep our soul in place: are we willing to disappoint human expectations, in order to save the human soul? Will we be conformed to the world, or will we be transformed by it? Whatever we do in this place, we are running out of time.
Place, however, is precise. Our experience of a certain place may be relative, but not the place itself; “it is what it is” regardless of perspective. If I say I will be some place at a certain time, the one thing that is non-negotiable is my presence in that place. I may not be on time for whatever reason, but the bottom line is that I was not there, in place, as promised. I can make up time, but I cannot pretend to be somewhere I’m not, unless I live in a different time, like Memo Cruz in the 2009 film Sleep Dealer. Director Alex Rivera neatly juxtaposes an unknown time, void of place, with a familiar story: the conflict between archaic systems of automated exploitative control and the essence of what makes us human – the capacity to love.
Santa Ana del Rio, Mexico is a place without a time. The village could exist now, or 100 years ago. In this film, directed by Alex Rivera, is a dying dustbowl community in the future. Thirsty for life, it’s people pay for water that once flowed freely but is now dammed and owned by an American corporation willing to protect the valuable resource with deadly force. Memo lives near the dam with his parents and brother, though he would rather be any place but home. His father is in denial, holding on to past dreams of living off the land, tied to the place. Memo knows this dream is dead. He lives in a time when place no longer exists except for social hierarchy; the have’s live in one place, the have-nots in another. The only way Memo can escape his place in life is through technology and his own dreams of finding work in a hi-tech factory in the north. Ironically, however, it is his passion for gadgetry, and his home-made radio, that condemns him to technological slavery.
After eavesdropping on the water company’s security force communications, his signal is located by dam headquarters in America. His place is identified and targeted as housing suspected “Aqua-Terrorists.” In this age, anti-terrorism is engaged in a new and improved way. The military strikes via remote control drones. Miles away from the target, an American soldier connects to a network of machines, inserting wires into his implanted Matrix-like "nodes." Then, from the comfort and safety of his station, the soldier bombs the target, a gladiator event that is commercialized for viewing in a live American reality television broadcast, narrated by a COPS voice narrator. Memo happens to catch this episode, watching in horror as “hi-tech heroes blow the hell out of the bad guys,” his father, his home, destroyed. The crowd goes wild.
Rivera has created a world that is less science fiction and more prophetic vision; it is a reality that already exists, our technology just hasn’t caught up yet. Further, Rivera rightly assumes future American television audiences will become more grossly perverted in their narcotized dysfunction of living as apathetic bystanders. In Rivera’s future, the human condition has not changed with time, we simply have more advanced gadgets to separate and alienate, disconnect and disenfranchise. The American corporations are still in control, defended by military might. Property lines between the US and Mexico, between life and water, are fiercely protected. Exploitative policies are played out across the border, using fresh, innovative technology.
Illegal immigration is no longer a problem for future America. Migrant workers can work for us without ever leaving the discomfort of their home; the company completes the work without the physical presence of the worker. The person is removed from our place, keeping to his place, thus no longer in our face constantly reminding us that our prosperity requires that others live in poverty. It’s the American dream, one in which sleep deprived employees work 12 hour shifts like robots, literally. In cities across America, physical labor is completed by little robots operated by real people south of the border. These sleepwalking spirits are sapped of their soul in exchange for money they can send home, (minus a hefty service fee.) Hardly the hi-tech dream job Memo was hoping for, but this is not the way the job is advertised. Guys like Memo hang their hopes on the lure of more money to better provide for family. With a healthy dose of guilt for his part in killing his father, Memo is driven to journey north to Tijuana, destined to take his place among the masses of indentured servants. As expected, the city is harsh, feels desperate. It isn’t long before Memo is plugged into the system, thanks to the help of Luz, an aspiring journalist who has dreams of her own.
Luz lives the tech life, first as a node installer, and secondly, and more passionately, as a writer. In this time, writing no longer requires paper or pen or even a keypad. After inserting the appropriate wires into her implanted nodes, Luz downloads her memories into a database; here she expresses thoughts and reflections which are then submitted to be searched and sold worldwide. Her memories of her first chance encounter with Memo stirs interest in a buyer, who solicits more entries and pays for them in advance. Money motivates as strongly in this place and time as it does in our own. Luz easily tracks down the newly arrived villager, having advised him earlier as to where to get node implants. She finds him huddled in a crowded alley, disheveled from his search for a reputable implanter, which turned out to be as tenuous as finding a reliable crack addict.
It doesn’t take long for Luz and Memo to connect more than nodes, though it’s not an open, honest connection. Luz is pulling out details of Memo’s life for the purpose of fulfilling her buyer’s request. Memo is supplying his memories because of his growing attachment to her. Though Memo is being provided for emotionally, Luz is using him nonetheless; directing intimate conversations to reveal a targeted memory is a form of exploitation. Mild, perhaps, and voluntary, but the memories are obtained under duress. This is a central theme in the film; the misuse of resources. Water, once freely available, is dammed, controlled and sold as an overpriced commodity. Emotions and memories, sensitive and authentic, are manipulated, taken advantage of, and vended for entertainment. Labor is extorted, human resource exploited for the sole purpose of profit. The cost is losing our sense of place and time, the context that feeds what makes us human; our mind, heart, dreams, character – our soul. In Sleepdealer, the soul is stolen and sold. What is most disconcerting is how easily the body, that place that stores the soul, is changed to better fit the emptiness, to more conveniently steal the soul away. The nodes, surgically punched into human limbs, become the holes through which we lose ourselves. Though this film is fiction, I say our scientific, cultural, and social direction is more close to this place and time than we should be daring to move. There is solution, but it is spiritual and therefore inherently set-up against concrete reality that so many people have come to rely.
If any hope exists, it is found, ironically, in the American soldier, the one who controlled the droid that dropped the bomb on Memo’s home. There is a brief scene where he is at the table with his mother and father. The soldier asks his father if he ever had doubts about what he did when he was soldier. His father is adamant in his curt response, “No.” His mother is quick to console the young soldier’s conscious. “We’re so proud of you.” What’s a soldier to do? Herein lies the question, its answer determining how humanity will fare in the war to keep our soul in place: are we willing to disappoint human expectations, in order to save the human soul? Will we be conformed to the world, or will we be transformed by it? Whatever we do in this place, we are running out of time.
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 COMMENTS: 3
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1. Posted on 19.Feb.10 From: Ben Nobi
This sounds complicated and fascinating.
2. Posted on 18.Feb.10 From: Chinmay
Sounds like a wonderful film. Although, the concept of time and place possibly existing differently is long disproved by Einstein's relativity. Anyway, good thought experiment, and good message.
3. Posted on 18.Feb.10 From: Chinmay
Sounds like a wonderful film. Although, the concept of time and place possibly existing differently is long disproved by Einstein's relativity. Anyway, good thought experiment, and good message.